'interstices'

Artist: Amy Hotch (aka A.M. Hoch)

Location: Alice Austen House

Medium: Installation

Details: ARTIST STATEMENT

Domestic interiors are maps of our most intimate memories, thoughts, and dreams. The in-between spaces—the baseboards, the spaces between the curtains and the floor, the cracks between the furniture and the walls—seem to collect the detritus of our experiences and imagination. Interstices is about reading between the lines of the everyday world—that is, breaking the boundaries of space and uncovering what is hidden.

The Alice Austen House sits directly on the harbor—the water and New York City skyline are inseparable from it. Taking the harbor today as a point of departure, this installation leads the viewer into Austen’s particular time and place. Alice Austen grew up when the camera was just becoming a household item. The first cameras—like our first rooms—contain the mystery and wonder of our earliest explorations into our perceptions and our selves. Alice’s passion for her home, her camera (which literally derives from the word “room”), and the complicated, coded sexuality of her time make this site particularly evocative. Using paintings, videotapes, mirrors, and the camera obscura, this installation celebrates the spirit of our first explorations of the “I” and the “eye.”

CREDITS: Special thanks to Hugh Phear, whose technical brilliance, talent, and generosity made this show possible.

Video Production courtesy of Primal Digital, LLC www.primaldigital.com

DVD Mastering courtesy of Romeo Alaeff, Figure1.com www.figure1.com

Photographs by Andy Alpern www.golemproductions.com

Excerpt from the New York Times art review, by Holland Carter

"Best of all, though, is Amy Hotch's indoor work at the Alice Austen House, a museum of unusual interest on its own. Austen (1866-1952), a self-trained amateur photographer who left behind an extraordinary pictorial legacy, lived in this harbor-facing house — an 18th-century Dutch homestead turned into a Victorian mansion — for most of her life, until poverty forced her into the Staten Island poor house, where she died."

"The building is now a public historic site, though Austen is still very much in evidence in Ms. Hotch's tender, spirit-summoning work, which consists mostly of nearly inconspicuous video installations. Look through a keyhole and you see figures climbing stairs or moving about a room; at the bottom of a sugar bowl two women in 18th-century gowns sip tea. (Austen shared the house with her longtime partner, Gertrude Tate.) In the parlor, waves of harbor water splash across the walls, turning Austen's house — which she called Clear Comfort — into a piece of living sculpture where outside and inside are one."